Professional and amateur athletes alike strive to obtain a level of athletic ability. Unfortunately, however, their chosen exercise routines may not allow the athlete to excel to their full potential. Further, individuals without experienced coaches or trainers are even less likely to reach their full potential. Thus, merely following a standard exercise routine will not assist the individual to improve certain performance characteristics that may be important. For example, an individual who desires to play football for a professional sports team may have adequate speed to be considered a possible member of the team or league; however, his reactive agility may be below acceptable ranges. Blindly following an improper exercise routine may not improve his responsiveness.
Further, coaches and recruiters need to quickly determine the performance characteristics of several individuals in a relatively short period of time. Current systems and methods require training people to administer a plurality of testing protocols. Generally, each testing protocol requires individual equipment, leading to increased costs. Past attempts to utilize one machine or system to measure fitness parameters for different sports, (such as, for example: basketball and soccer) often failed due to the different activities that need to be conducted specific to each sport. Further, current systems and methods often rely on predefined activities and do not present activities which allow a user to determine a course of action. Rather, prior systems may permit users to remember routines rather than determine reactive agility to an unknown stimulus, thus for reactive agility measurements, prior art systems are largely ineffective and/or not sport-specific.
Therefore, for these and other reasons, there is a need for improved systems and methods.